


It's For Luck

by Psychohamster21



Category: Hockey RPF
Genre: Gen, Tampa Bay Lightning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-28
Updated: 2014-02-28
Packaged: 2018-01-14 02:37:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,968
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1249624
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Psychohamster21/pseuds/Psychohamster21
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>With all of the trade rumors circling his beloved captain, Stamkos finds a new way of comforting himself until the monsoon passes. **SELF-HARM TRIGGER WARNING** Please, don't read if you can be triggered.</p>
            </blockquote>





	It's For Luck

**Author's Note:**

> Self-harm is a tragic act that should be addressed. It is not beautiful or romantic. If you are struggling with self-harm please seek help. If you are struggling with anything really, seek help. You are worth helping.

It hurts… I never imagined that it would feel this bad, but it hurts so much I didn’t even want to move. I groaned when I did anything and I was always on the brink of tears. I pressed my face into my pillow until I was on the verge of passing out without even realizing it. Digging my fingers into my body made me stop thinking about it for a moment.

It was barely twenty four hours before I accidentally drew blood. My finger nails slicing into my skin and the pain was a relief. That was the first time I felt relief in a while and when I did it seemed like he was just a little further away from leaving. So, from then on, for the next few days, every time I felt like he was going to leave I would draw a little bit of blood. It became a ritual, a sacrifice for good luck.

In two days I was starting to run out of places to hide the cuts. I knew that if I wore skin tight clothes they would see the bandages so I started to seal them with glue.t deny them I felt my heart sink and when my heart sank I cut longer, upping my little ritual to keep him here. It was foolish, I knew that, but still it made me feel better in its own way.

Every morning I woke up shaking, my conviction growing hourly to keep up with what I was doing. I was soon called into the doctor’s room to see both Coop and Marty were there with the doctor who tersely told me to take off my shirt.

“Why?” my voice betrayed my fear of the action which just firmed their already pursed lips. What I had been doing wasn’t beautiful or poetic. I knew that much. I wanted to hide it more than anything else, bury it deep where they couldn’t see it.

“Off!” The doctor ordered just before I looked at the faces of those around me and crumpled down into a mess of tears. I couldn’t show him, even though every scabbed up scratch was for him it had to remain my secret. I couldn’t tell them. It would be bad luck.

Their expressions softened ever so slightly when they saw me collapse and they barely lifted up my shirt before sharply inhaling and looking away in unison. “How long has this been going on for?” Coop asked quietly as if he were a sad father who hadn’t even considered one of his kids doing such a thing.

If I was honest they would know. I knew the date it started. “A little while,” I said between sobs.

“How long is a little while?” the doctor asked just as quietly.

I took a sharp breath, “Just a little while, okay?”

My eyes had been cemented closed for a little while now, refusing to see the disgusted looks of those around me. I felt one of them sit next to me and felt their fingers gently caressing the hem of my shirt. “May I?” It was Marty’s voice.

If I denied him, would they know? I couldn’t push him away, he might leave. I nodded slowly and soon enough I felt my shirt being raised and occasionally the backs of his fingers would caress my cut body. He gently ran his fingers over differing cuts, just barely touching the freshest one which was probably the length of his hand.

“It has to be about a week,” the doctor said quietly to Coop, probably under the impression I wasn’t listening, “he lifted his shirt a week ago and I didn’t see anything of the sort.”

Marty looked to be half listening when I just barely opened my eyes. He looked on with sympathy as if he understood something about it. “You look how I feel,” he sounded like he was talking in his sleep, as if the words were never supposed to slip out.

“What do they mean to you?” he asked more coherently as he traced his thumb over the longest one again. Maybe some would say that that was an insensitive comment, but I appreciated it on a certain level. He knew that there was a reason behind it all. He wanted to understand. The others, well, I don’t really know what they want to know.

“I…It’s for luck,” my voice was scratchy. That was why I kept it up wasn’t it? It was because if I did it I felt like he wasn’t going to leave. That is what I kept telling myself. If I cut just a little longer then he’ll stay. If I cut just a couple more times, he’ll stay. Or was it because every time that it was brought up that he was going to leave I felt so much pain and betrayal that someone I held so high up was nothing more than a bundle of lies and betrayal, that I kept this up to control the pain I felt as much as I could while hoping that it would be lucky to do so?

“I don’t care if doing that to yourself will win us the Stanley Cup,” Coop sounded hurt, “Please don’t hurt yourself.”

“That doesn’t even matter right now,” I screamed. The funny thing was that I never thought of it as hurting myself. I was hurting before, this was helping me. Even with it put in my face that dragging a blade across my flesh was hurting myself I still couldn’t bring myself to truly believe that what I was doing wasn’t a good thing in some way.

Marty seemed to ignore the comment. “Is it working?” he asked quietly and I looked past him, the looks on the others’ faces told me that they had figured it out. They knew I was doing it so he wouldn’t leave.

“So far,” tears were flowing more slowly now, “I just hope it keeps up.” And I truly hoped that it did. I didn’t know what I would do if he turned out to be that petty of a person. I had held him to such high standards my whole time here and he was so precious to me that I didn’t know what to do with all of the negativity being thrown at him. Something I idolized was being tarnished left and right and I was greedily clinging to the ideal that he was still the same wonderful person that I knew he was.

It hurt so much that I longed for something sharp to make the pain I was feeling go away. Had it really become a habit in just a few days?

“Marty,” the doctor spoke very quietly, “can you leave?”

He looked up, slightly confused, about to comply even though he didn’t understand, but I grabbed onto his arm.

“Don’t,” my grip was tight, “Please, don’t leave me.” The tears began to flow again and the pain was surging against the inside of my chest, tightening it so that breathing was almost painful. I knew, logically, that they just wanted him to go into the other room maybe thinking that he was a trigger for me, but even knowing that I couldn’t help but imagining him slipping away and never coming back.

When those seemingly benign words slipped out of my mouth, I had imagined him just sitting back down and waiting to hear what the doctor wanted to say without him there, or maybe I expected him to console me and say that he would be right outside and that I should listen to the doctor, but instead those few words must have said everything.

His eyes looked at me sadly and he sucked on his bottom lip, “This is because of the rumors.”

He seemed to say it as a question that didn’t need answering, but I gave a very small nod just in case he needed confirmation.

“The luck you need is for me not to leave,” he bit down on the tip of his thumb for a moment before quietly calling out, “Stammer.” He then pulled me into a hug, trying his hardest not to cry himself. He was trying to be strong for me. “If it has been this hard on you why not just come talk to me?”

I stuttered for a good while, thinking of the best words to say and once I came up with the most eloquent response I had ever created all of my emotions came spilling out instead, “Because I didn’t want to find out that the Marty I loved was a lie!”

It hurt so much just thinking about it that I hadn’t noticed that my hand was moving up my chest to claw at my wounds until Marty’s hand firmly intertwined with mine. It was reassuring that he kept me from doing it, but it was frightening that I hadn’t realized that I was about to hurt myself again.

“I’m going to make a deal with you, okay?” his voice was level and soft, very different from the joking Marty that I was used to and he certainly wasn’t the fatherly sympathetic Marty from earlier.

I nodded ever so slightly, “Okay.” I should have waited for him to say what it was, because I imagined he was probably going to ask me to stop just like Coop and the doctor would and I had the feeling that I couldn’t just stop anymore. That sounded a little pathetic didn’t it, in a few days the ever cheery Steven Stamkos couldn’t think about his captain without wanting to bleed from some somewhere on his body. Now I was working with a self-deprecating inner monologue which certainly didn’t help.

“I am pretty sure you’ll have a hard time stopping. You can slip every once in a while, stuff happens. But, so long as you work on not hurting yourself, I’ll work on how I feel about all of this snub stuff. We can work on feeling better together, okay?” The way he spoke made me want to cry. He didn’t tell me to stop dead. He understood that it was going to be hard, maybe it was because he was working with his own inner cuts that for the life of him wouldn’t heal. “If we are too afraid to lean on others then at least we can lean on each other, you know?”

The trade deadline came and passed with the media still hounding on the subject, but I knew he wouldn’t leave me high and dry. He took the liberty of deleting all social media applications from my phone so I wouldn’t have to worry about what the world was saying about him and he would only let me hear about the negativity from those around us who would have already softened the blow. And, in turn, I was with him every time he had contact with our GM or our owner about any of the events in the past year.

Slowly, things got better. Most of my wounds healed with little to no scaring and Marty hadn’t gone anywhere and was slowly getting to interact with Yzerman again. It wasn’t the best relationship in the world, understandably. Pain doesn’t just go away, no matter how many medals one wins.

He stayed for his family on the ice and I was able to believe in the legacy of Marty St. Louis again. And with my leg fully recovered and the playoffs just a short ways off we got back to working together as a unit that was a part of a bigger family of people we both cared about. Scars or no scars, the Lightning were back and we were looking for certain silver trophy.


End file.
